In Defiance
by Jessa L'Rynn
Summary: It's been a year from hell, under the thumb of a madman. What starts with a prayer and a small group of ragtag survivors has implications for great and terrible changes at the end. Cordelia Lear's winning bid for the last Support Stacie Auction.
1. Chapter 1

**In Defiance**

_Chapter One: Wonderland and Wanderers_

"Guess what I got today, Jack!" the Master exclaimed gleefully.

Jack, exhausted and not really interested in anything that might make the Master happy, strongly considered letting the caisson he was supporting by main force alone simply drop. So he'd be squished into jam. So what. He'd be back tomorrow for another round.

"I was downstairs today, doing my inspections, minding my own business, not causing anyone any trouble," the Master proclaimed in grandiose and wholly dishonest innocence. "Out of these slums you people call homes, a woman came after me with, of all things, an old service revolver. Says my people murdered her baby and her daddy, and she wasn't going to miss the chance to take a shot at me."

Jack waited for the punch line. He knew it would be cruel, probably unnecessary, and most likely insane. "Well, I couldn't let an accusation like that go uninvestigated, could I?" said the Master with a pout. This was despite the fact that most of the surviving humans on the planet could easily say the exact same thing. "I looked her up, and wouldn't you know it, she was wrong! Well, sort of right." He chuckled as he tried to imitate the Doctor's trick of speech (from back before the old man had become mostly silent). "Well, completely right in fact, but in effect mistaken. I judged her to be a liar and I've ordered her brought on board!"

The Master laughed grandly and vaulted up to stand on the caisson Jack was supporting. "I have my very own Alice for my wonderland now, Magic Jack! Isn't it lovely?"

Jack would never remember what happened in the next few minutes, but when he breathed again, he was hanging from his reinforced chains by his arms, with the floor not there to support him. Ah, the old slow crucifixion again. Uncomfortable.

"You almost got me, this time, Jack," the Master said, peering through a wall of glass that Jack hadn't noticed at first. He wasn't laughing anymore. He was grim and vicious and all the more deadly for being nearly thwarted. "Can't have that, can we?" He laughed without any humor, the noise every evil villain seemed to strive to acquire, coming to the mad Time Lord effortlessly. "Here, breathe this."

The Master hit a button that opened a hatch behind Jack. The Valiant, well up into the stratosphere as it hovered above the Earth, lurched violently as the cabin mostly depressurized. There was barely enough oxygen. It was also freezing cold and the wind was intolerable.

Jack looked through the glass to see the Master's retreating back. He imagined, instead, Alice's strong, attractive face peering at him, not one trace of her father in her physical attributes, not one trace of any parent she had in her temperament. He imagined her weeping over…

Jack didn't even hear it himself when his defeated cry rang out to the abandoning heavens. "Oh, gods, if there's anyone out there who even can listen to me, please, please help me. Please."

Someone heard.

* * *

"_Oh, the water is wide, and I can't cross o'er. Neither have I wings to fly. But give me a boat that can carry two, and both shall row, my love and I…"_ The voice belonged to a woman, and sounded both Welsh and tragic as it wreathed a pale pianissimo through an abandoned block of flats in what had once been London.

A man's voice twined with hers, equally Welsh, a soft, pain-haunted tenor that rose and fell around her melody line, an old harmony that suited an old, old tune. "_For love is gentle, and love is kind, and love is sweet, when first it's new. But love grows old and waxes cold, and fades away, like morning dew."_

They joined the chorus with a dark, moody baritone, and a darker, coarser bass. The song comforted the night. There wasn't anything else that could be done.

An unfamiliar shadow falling across the floor silenced the song. No one in the burned out flats knew anyone who had electric lighting anymore, so they were all very concerned. When a human-looking blonde appeared in the doorway of the former flats, all four people in the room considered her carefully. "Hands up," said the smallest of the men, finally, drawing a weapon seemingly from nowhere. "You're too clean to be here on legit business. Who are you?"

"We have a mutual friend," the woman said in a very strangely accented voice. It sounded as if she naturally spoke entirely differently from the way she was trying to speak, but it wasn't the affected speech of someone trying to sound of better birth. (Although, to the youngest man's ear, there was some of that as well.) She turned off her light and stepped more clearly into theirs, revealing a small, sad-eyed blonde in a blue leather jacket, dark jeans, and a jumper.

"How did you find us?" asked the woman, sizing up the other woman with grave curiosity.

"I was looking for you, if you're Torchwood, but I didn't find you." The woman looked up at the nearly destroyed remnants of the building they were squatting in. "I used to live here," she admitted. "In another life, this is where I spent it."

"Yeah, well, we're not up for company, so just shove off," said the thinnest of the men.

"Owen Harper," said the blonde with a shake of her head. "An ass in any Universe."

"How'd you know my name?" Owen demanded.

The woman smiled wryly through a mouth a bit too wide. "We've met," she said, shortly. "That makes you Ianto Jones, and you Gwen Cooper. I'm not sure who you are," she apologized to the last man in the room.

"Rhys Williams," the man introduced, eyeing the blonde as if contemplating knocking her over to search her for weapons.

"How on Earth did you end up joining this lot?" the blonde asked. "Where's Tosh? We need to get moving, fast."

"You've not given us a name," Gwen said. "You're neat and trim and organized. You could be working for our Lord and Master." She spat those last four words with all the vicious contempt of a woman forced to worship a sewer rat.

"I can't give you my name. It creates problems for various reasons." The four moved into a hasty circle and the woman held up her hands as if expecting them to jump her. "I'm not armed," she insisted. "I'm never armed." She frowned and then said, "Our mutual friend told me to tell you 'Rhea Sylva'. Apparently, she means something to you, too."

Owen nodded. "God of War's missus," he commented.

"Birthed the twins Romulus and Remus," continued Ianto, "who were raised by a she-wolf after they were abandoned on the mountain to die. Meanwhile, their mother was…"

"Made into torch wood," said their guest.

"Jack always had the strangest sense of humor," Gwen said.

"Wait!" cautioned Rhys, "how d'you know that boss of yours sent her? I thought you didn't even know he was alive."

"That's Jack's password," Gwen said. She turned to the woman. "Can we call you Rhea?"

"Just as well be Lupa, me," said the newly christened Rhea. "Works either way, call me what you will, but we have got to get going, now."

"Where are we going?" Gwen demanded.

"Back to Cardiff, I'm afraid," Rhea said regretfully.

"Listen, lady," protested Owen, "you got no idea what we went through to get back there and then away again. It's not happening."

"It'll be much easier this time," Rhea said. "Ah, there you are, Tosh. I was starting to worry about you."

Tosh, slipping around the corner behind Rhea, had a broken baseball bat in her hand. She looked like she'd been about to use it, when the blonde pivoted on a heel and struck like an adder. She did nothing particularly violent, just one moment, Tosh was holding the bat, the next she'd dropped it and was nursing stinging knuckles.

Owen shoved past Rhea, grabbing Tosh and checking her over. "Not armed? What the hell'd you hit her with?" He was furious. Rhea let the faintest of smiles show.

"She's with you?" Tosh asked, surprised. She turned to the newcomer, apology in her expression. "Sorry, all I heard was 'working for our Lord and Master'. You're very fast."

"You were quick thinking," the blonde said. She bent over and picked up the bat, turning it over and over in her hand. She nodded suddenly and handed the bat back to Tosh. "Keep it – it's a good bat. Saved my mum's life, once, this thing."

"She says she used to live here," Gwen said, "and she gave us Jack's password. Says he sent her."

"Where'd you learn to fight like that?" Rhys asked, fascinated. "That'd be a great trick in a pub fight."

Rhea grinned. "I like you," she said. "Keeping optimistic. I picked it up at another Torchwood."

Ianto moved from where he was gathering their equipment to stand between the woman and the others. Gwen was entirely certain he was about to argue.

What stopped Ianto, what stopped everything, was the terrifyingly familiar machine whir of the Toclafane in flight. It sounded like a scissors sharpener and smelled like an abattoir, and there was a high-pitched sort of whistle as well, just in case the vile little things weren't horrible enough.

There was no one on watch – they'd gotten distracted by the newcomer, and now there was every likelihood they were all going to die. Gwen looked around frantically for a place to hide everyone and fast. Owen and Rhys reached for weapons, Tosh and Ianto's eyes both scanned for hiding holes. Only Rhea did something different and unexpected.

She seemed to be doing some sort of breathing or concentration exercise. Her eyes were closed, her face serene. She took a great deep breath and let it out very slowly. Her eyes remained closed. "Right," she said, holding out her hands, "I know you don't trust me, you've only just met me. Do you trust Jack?"

Gwen and Ianto said, "yes," Tosh said nothing, just nodded. Both Gwen and Tosh murmured a yes at almost the same time, realizing that Tosh's nod would do no good. Rhys trusted Gwen's trust, Gwen knew. Owen was the hold out, but he rolled his eyes, then glanced around rapidly to see if he could spot the impending doom. "Doesn't look like we've got a choice, does it?" he demanded. "Whatever you're going to do, get on with it."

The blonde smiled, a beatific smile not unlike a child's. "My mum adores you," she said. "No idea why." She seized Tosh's hand. "Everybody catch hands and stay as close as you can possibly get – yes, you too, Ianto, as close as humanly possible. I'm terribly new at this."

"New at what?" Tosh asked, sounding slightly frantic. Gwen felt her hair standing on end and realized it wasn't fear causing it. Some sort of weird static charge seemed to be building in the air around them.

The blonde woman opened her eyes. Gwen would have sworn she saw something glittering and wholly inhuman, but the woman turned her face up and away before the former PC could be sure. "Don't look," the blonde commanded in a very soft tone. "Hold tight, close your eyes."

Everything went very, very strange.

* * *

If Gwen had still been present at the burned out Estate building that used to be called Bucknall House, she would have realized that the sound left hovering, disembodied, in the air behind them was the very same noise she'd heard just as she discovered Jack had disappeared.

* * *

A computer monitor from the defunct planet Earth detected a highly unusual activity on the Earth's surface. It tried to talk to other monitoring devices, compare notes, check itself. It failed to find anything else working.

Unfortunately it was programmed, in that event, not to lie quietly and continue to analyze the situation, but to draw as much attention to itself as possible.

It succeeded admirably.

* * *

"What did you do?" Owen demanded, frantically, dusting himself down with flickering hands. "What did you just do?"

Tosh, rather amused by how white his face was, watched to see what the blonde would admit to and what she would not. Tosh herself was almost desperate with the urge to pounce on the woman and demand answers. What sort of technology did this, where had she acquired it…

"Where are we?" Rhys, far more practical, it seemed, than the entire Torchwood team, asked the question they all should have asked. Mind, Gwen and Ianto checking the perimeter was reasonable, just as Tosh investigating the unique technology. That meant…

"You're shirking, Owen," Gwen snapped. "Make sure everyone's okay before the panic attack, all right?"

Gwen's accent always got thicker when she was upset. Tosh smiled behind a hand she lifted quickly to cover the smile. Her job was to question this woman. She got to it.

"You said you worked for Torchwood before," she started. "I'm assuming it wasn't Torchwood One, or Ianto would have recognized you?"

The blonde frowned. "Can we just deal with what we're in the middle of, and leave question and answer for later?" she asked. "Is this, or is it not, one of the lower levels of your Hub?"

Gwen blinked in shock. "It is," she realized suddenly. "What in the hell happened here?"

"It looks like someone blew up the whole base," Ianto announced from an open doorway. His voice didn't sound the slightest bit shocked. Typical Ianto, Tosh realized, he just called it as he saw it.

"Isn't that special?" Owen complained. "What are we doing back here? It was all we could do to get away from here the first time."

"How did that work?" the blonde asked. "Jack said you'd been sent to the Himalayas. I was prepared to chase you up a mountain range."

"How'd you find us anyway?" Gwen wondered.

"I told you, I didn't find you." The blonde sighed and sat down on a bench. "Look, if you had your equipment and I knew what I was doing, I'd let you question me and scan me and everything else to your hearts' content. But there's no time!"

"What's so damn important!?" Owen insisted.

"Your Lord and Master, as he calls himself, has Jack's daughter."

Tosh had never heard silence quite so loud.


	2. Chapter 2

**In Defiance**

_Chapter 2: Appropriating Alice_

"So tell me, what do you make of this? Looks funny, don't you think?" The Master was enjoying the Doctor's morning workout by indulging him in a trip round the conference room. Being pulled behind a cart. Set at high speed.

Far be it from him to allow the other Time Lord to get bored. The Doctor, bored, had been dangerous since childhood. Old age wouldn't stop him, the Master was sure of that. All the same, he flicked the screwdriver and the cart detached, leaving the chair still rolling because it was programmed to do. "Do you know what it looks like?" the Master continued, because the Doctor still wasn't even trying to play along – of course he wasn't, the obnoxious, self-righteous twat. "Of course you do. A finer Prydonian education even Rassilon couldn't have bought." He got intent and quiet, accusatory and strained. "Gallifrey's blue-eyed boy, and look at what you've done!"

He snagged the back of the wheelchair, but inertia kept the body in it going. The Doctor wouldn't give him the satisfaction of making even one sound of protest, but there was always the satisfaction of the thud his body made as it hit the carpet. The Master dropped the printout he'd been attempting to discuss right into the other Time Lord's crawling path. The Doctor couldn't avoid it.

He blinked down through watery, bleary, brown eyes, but if the Doctor was surprised by the readings, he didn't so much as twitch. And people wondered why the Master didn't have time to torture the deserving civilians! Gleefully, the Master bellowed, "Someone's got a time machine!"

The Doctor rolled over onto his back and glowered with open, defiant hatred. The Master beamed right back at him. Gently, he explained, "I'm going to catch it!"

* * *

"Jack hasn't mentioned a daughter before," Ianto said warily.

"I know," the blonde answered quietly. "It's not the sort of thing he'd explain." The blonde seemed to put the topic aside exactly like Jack would and went on with, "She's being held at the prison the Master put in Cardiff Castle…"

"Does she take after him?" Owen demanded.

"What do you mean?"

"The fact that Jack won't stay croaked, no matter how you off him?" Owen clarified.

"Oh." The blonde sighed. "She's not actually his biological daughter."

They all stared incredulously at the woman, and she looked like she was about to scream with frustration. "Look, you all know your boss is a time traveler," she said rapidly. "He can't go around fathering his ancestors; it'd wreck everything. Her biological father was an alien, her mum worked for Torchwood back in the bad old days. Jack claimed the kid to protect it and the mum. But that doesn't change the fact that he raised her, and that he can't watch her tortured. And it doesn't change the fact that I'm not gonna let him see that. So, please, can we get on with this?"

Ianto really wanted to question the woman for another few hours, but… "There's every chance the Valiant knows we're here," he said. "They detected us last time."

"That's when they set the Tochlafane on the Hub," Tosh added by way of information.

Gwen rubbed her hands together, looking around the cold and abandoned lower level, eyeing everything with pronounced distaste. "Right, Owen, the weapons. Tosh, do you have any of your tech stashed down here? Ianto, supplies of any sort you can find. Rhys'll help you. And what do you need, Rhea?"

"There's a spot above your Hub where no one can see you," the blonde woman said, her eyebrows arched as if questioning. "It's a slab of concrete, right? D'you know about it?"

"Know about it?" Gwen said, incredulous, "Jack made a bloody lift out of it, didn't he? D'you know what caused the thing?"

The blonde shrugged. "We need to find that block."

"It's got to have been blown up!" Rhys exclaimed. "That was one of the first things that happened, after the Toclafane came down and started killing everyone – that mother ship thing used that Death Star gun it's got to level the whole Millenium Center area!"

"I know," the blonde said. "But the thing is, it's not just invisible; the assembled hordes of Genghis Kahn couldn't get past it. It can't have blown up. But with the right persuasion, it can be cut apart, and with the right modifications, the invisible property at least can be passed on. I'll be right back."

"You can't go out there," Gwen insisted. "You're the only one who can get us out of here if this plan goes to hell."

"Two things," Rhea said, firmly. "One, I'm also the only one who the Toclafane can't see, so I'm going out there. Two, you don't know your boss too well if you don't know that Jack _always_ has another way out."

"Unless he's following the Doctor," Ianto said morosely.

"Well, yes," Rhea allowed, "but he wasn't following the Doctor when he took over this place. And besides…" Ianto was almost certain the strange woman's eyes flashed gold. "That's where I come in."

They all set to work, frantically hoping to scrape together, among other things, enough time.

* * *

"Lookie, Doctor! There's another reading." The Master vaulted gleefully over the Doctor's stooped shoulders and raced to his instrument banks. "Oh, you'd love this. Come, boy." He whistled for the Doctor as for a dog and, when that did no good, turned his laser screwdriver on Tish Jones, waving it and offering the Doctor a head-tilted smile.

In resignation, the Doctor began ponderously to wheel himself over. The Master very quickly got bored with waiting and gestured the ornamental companion sibling into dragging the old boy over. "Haven't been this old since you were five hundred, have you?" the Master muttered as he settled the Doctor in front of the monitor and shooed Tish away with an appropriately vague gesture. Now she'd be wondering what exactly she was meant to do, and the Master could get furious at her for not reading his mind.

It was very, very good to be Emperor. He peered over the Doctor's shoulder at the monitor, making sure to make a nuisance of himself in every way. It was the little things, the tiny indignities and simple irritations – those were the things that made this whole experience truly special.

"Look," he ordered, pointing at the readings the Doctor couldn't possibly have missed. "That is a major yes-yes of a no-no," he proclaimed. The Doctor looked up at him and the Master saw, for the first time in months, something other than rage in the dark depths. It looked like hope, and the Master wasn't about to let that continue.

"If there were Time Lords," he declaimed, "they would almost certainly have something to say about that. Violating the third Law of Something Some Such and Time Lords selfishly keeping everything to themselves, of course. Sumptuary laws or such, wasn't it? I never paid much attention to the rules."

"Just enough to know which to break," the Doctor said, the first words he'd spoken in more than three days.

The Master whirled the other around in his chair, stopping him with a foot placed precisely between the old boy's knees. "You _should_ talk!" he growled. "What did you do? Oh yes!" He grandly quoted himself from earlier. "'_If _there were Time Lords!' But there aren't, because _you had to go and kill them_!"

He did have to do, and the Master knew that, just as he knew that the guilt was going to drive his former friend quite mad, eventually. It would be a beautiful thing to behold, the Doctor out of his mind under the weight of his own mistakes. "Well, there is me, and there's you, so we'll just have to do. I hereby declare myself Lord President, find who ever has that time machine as an enemy of the state, and order immediate termination. You can be Chancellor, Doctor. What do you think?"

"I think you need to stop." The Doctor still wanted him to control what the arrogant prat considered insanity. It was laughable. This was _power_. The Doctor, still pretending to be small, to be helping, to be as ordinary as being a Time Lord allowed, that was insane. The ridiculous man had possessed and exercised the full power of a mortal god. He'd actually, for a moment, had the option of being an _immortal _god.

"You always were a swotty little bastard," the Master complained.

He almost collapsed under the aggravation and the sound of drums, but then, oh then, miraculously and wonderfully, the reading came again. There it was, blindingly brilliant, an energy spike of incredible proportions. "That's very impressive," the Master admitted. "It looks almost like a TARDIS. But I've got a lock on it, now." Proudly, he sing-songed, "I'm going to catch it." He smirked grandly at the Doctor's wary, weary face. "Isn't that fantastic?"

The Doctor looked like he'd been force-fed something nasty. Now _that_ was worth it.

* * *

The easiest thing about all of this was that the Master had no teleport. In Gwen's opinion, it made everything far, far too easy for them. The guards had Alice out on the main green, waiting for transport to the Valiant.

The block that had been the invisible lift had been in pieces when Rhea brought it back, and she supplied everyone with a chunk on an improvised necklace, as well as supplementing their weapons and equipment with some from a stash she'd apparently kept elsewhere.

Owen and Ianto had agreed, surprisingly, on the subject of just having Rhea zap half the team into the Castle, then zap the lot of them out again. However, the strangely exhausted Rhea had had to veto it, confessing that there was only enough power for one more jump if she was very lucky.

"If there's no other way," Gwen had decided, "take Alice and go."

Rhea had agreed under only one counter-condition – that they do everything in their power to be sure that the Master did not take her alive. Ianto forced Gwen's hand by agreeing, quietly and with a terrifying conviction. She realized to her horror that Ianto had always known this, that he would never have allowed any of them to be brought to the Valiant. Worse, Owen was his willing accomplice, handing out cyanide tabs like they were all Cold War spies.

It was only then that Gwen really thought about it, only after nearly a year of running that she was finally confronted with the kind of leverage her pain would have on Jack. It was only then that she realized they were right.

Alice was an angry looking woman with a strongly beautiful face, dark of hair and eyes, with an olive complexion and a long, straight nose. She looked nothing like Jack, as far as Gwen could tell, before she remembered that the woman wasn't supposed to look like Jack.

It was the easiest thing in the world to sidle up to their leader's daughter and slip one of the necklaces over her head. Contact broke the perception spell for Alice, but it didn't disturb the Toclafane or the guards, because they were all distracted by the noise and commotion the others were making to lure them off.

Everything was going like clockwork according to plan, until the worst possible thing when wrong. One of the confused Tochlafane, flying around like a bunch of ball bearings in a clothes dryer, accidentally flew right into Rhea's side.

The others of the team scattered, following their orders. Everything started moving too fast to be believed. There were shocked exclamations, orders shouted, the Torchwood team sneaking out in the confusion.

"Go!" Rhea shouted. "Just go!"

"We only obey the Mister Master," one of the Tochlafane told Rhea, unaware that she was talking to anyone else.

She grinned wickedly, and suddenly a ball of golden light sprung up around her, swirling and whirling and bouncing the Tochlafane right off it. Gwen sighed in relief and began to sidle Alice out of there, realizing that must be what Rhea's transport looked like from the outside.

"Where are we going?" Alice demanded. "Who are you?"

"We work for your father," Gwen replied quietly. "We need you to come with us very, very quietly."

Alice might have had something to say in response to this, but there was a blinding flash of light and then, Rhea made absolutely certain that there was never a chance of the guards noticing the rest of them. Her golden nimbus abruptly turned blue. The Tochlafane were gleeful as they circled her, apparently projecting the blue field.

"Got her, got her," they sang. Then, with a sound of screaming and Ianto's gun firing rapidly, the Tochlafane and the girl they called Rhea Sylva disappeared.

Owen came up behind Gwen, shoving her in the back to get her moving. "Tosh and Rhys are already out. Ianto is on his way. Move."

* * *

"Where is the time machine?"

The blonde woke abruptly, immediately scrabbling to her feet. The Master. Not good. "What time machine?" She pawed at her pockets, looking for the cyanide capsule Owen had given her.

Jack's Torchwood team was exactly as he'd said – gifted and tough and optimistic and shocked. She hoped they'd all gotten away safely, because it didn't look like she had done.

Her surroundings were a small glass box in a large white room, with a maniacally grinning Time Lord peering in at her and holding up the cyanide pill. "Want this?" he asked cheerfully. "Can't have it." He chucked it into a slot in the wall labeled "Waste". At a guess, it had been incinerated. "Now, tell me who you are, how you knew I had little Alice, and what you've done with the time machine."

The blonde just glared back, looking intently at the Master's left eyebrow. She couldn't risk meeting his eyes, skilled hypnotist that he was. Not that she thought she would succumb to his mesmeric power, but it was the only way to be sure.

"Now, that's interesting," the Master realized. "You know some people, you must, if you've been warned about me. Been talking to UNIT? Torchwood knew nothing about me, so it can't have been Magic Jack's pretty pets. Don't tell me you know that sanctimonious unburied martyr out there." He gestured vaguely upward, making his captive suspect he was gesturing at the deck.

She said nothing, merely stood, arms folded across her chest, and glowered fiercely at the Master's nose. "Well, I don't know about your manners, but I don't like them. There's no way you dropped that machine or hid it, so the only thing left is swallowing it. So… Let's just have a scan of you, shall we?"

The woman remained firm. If anything, she increased her haughty disdain. The Master also said nothing, just walked a slow orbit around her box. Then, he flicked a strangely familiar device at a wall. A screen mounted behind the blonde woman came on.

The Master seemed to find nothing he wanted. The blonde allowed herself to almost relax, almost be relieved. The Master glared and then turned the small device on her again. This time it shot out a beam of greenish-yellow light.

Pain owned her. It started in her chest where the beam touched, and spread in blazing shockwaves over her body. The whole of the world was fire and screaming and pain pain _painpainpain_…

* * *

On Earth, Martha Jones returned to England at last, and was met at the shore not by one man with a medical degree but by a party of Torchwood operatives as invisible to the Tochlafane as she was.

* * *

On the Valiant, the Master seemed to be snickering a lot more and quite smugly. The Doctor, who refused to allow himself to grow nervous about what had amused the Master so very much kept quiet in the seething rage inside his head. As he had told the Master the very last time he spoke, the last time he would speak until this was over, he had only one thing to say to the man.

* * *

When the agony ended, she realized she was curled up in a ball on the deck of the ship, tears streaming down her face. The Master was entirely too close to her, leering. It took her several long deep breaths to realize he was lying next to her on the deck.

"Oh, you pretty, pretty thing," he murmured, his face mere inches from hers. "I should have recognized you." He mirrored her position, and prodded at her randomly.

When she finally lashed out to hit him, he caught her hand in a fierce grip and dragged her all unwilling to her feet. He tugged her into a close embrace, lifting her feet off the ground and waltzing with her toward a door. "Be careful what you wish for," he said, with a textbook example of the evil villain laugh. When he reached the door, he pushed a button on the wall and shoved her through the sudden gap.

The cell that now held her was a coffin sized box, only big enough to stand up straight. The Master peered in at her through a tiny window, his eyes bright and dangerously deranged, his words low and threatening. "Welcome back, Rose Tyler. Welcome home."


	3. Chapter 3

**In Defiance**

_Chapter 3: We're All Mad Here_

"You look good as a House Elf," the Master said cheerfully, peering into the cage that held the Doctor's latest modified form. "Well, but you've got clothes. I think I'll put you in a bright green suit and tell everyone you're a Leprechaun. After all, everyone believes whatever name you give a species, when you're the Lord and Master of all creation!"

The tiny Doctor, clinging to the bars of his new cage, glared out at the Master, his huge, wholly alien eyes full of unveiled disgust and quiet rage. The Master grinned. "I'll get you your own show on the telly," he promised in a small cooing voice. "You can give me marvelous prezzies in front of millions of viewers." He snagged Lucy close and cuddled her. It was almost absurd how beautiful she was, really. "I'll be there with my blonde and beautiful faithful companion, when you learn what new treasure you're giving me each week."

He leaned over the hyper-aged Time Lord and tapped out the rhythm of the drums on the cage bars. "Anyway, look after the Missus, Gollum. I'm off to fetch Martha Jones."

* * *

"Nothing to say?" the Master asked the kneeling Martha Jones. He looked to the Doctor. "You used to have companions that could absorb the Time Vortex," he said. "I had to murder the entirety of Torchwood to get to this one, and she's useless."

Everyone glared at the Master, and the Master grinned. "No, really," he insisted. "Remember that time machine I was going to catch?" He snapped his fingers and his guards pulled a cloth off of a glass box (about the size of a small adult human) he'd located opposite the Doctor in the Valiant control room. "I call it the Randomly Occurring Spatiotemporal Enigma," he said proudly. "That's nice and pompus, isn't it?"

The box only looked glass, the Doctor realized. It wasn't, though – it wasn't even a box. Instead, it was a temporal abeyance field, holding a single occupant inside a light-shroud of streaming purples and screaming blues. It looked for all the Universe like a young TARDIS fighting for its very survival. "What's it doing?" the Doctor couldn't help but ask.

"Trying to get away from me, I think," said the Master, vaguely, looking the box over with his ridiculous thoughtful pout. "She doesn't like me very much, really." The Master grinned. "You see, I'm not afraid of the big bad wolf."

"You're just playing for time," Jack accused suddenly.

The Doctor stared at him. There was only one implication about who was in the box, and it simply wasn't possible. Jack had to know that, and had to know that the Doctor wouldn't be fooled by such a simple ploy. Had the Master somehow figured out what Martha had done?

No, it simply wasn't possible. The Master wanted something, needed something, that he thought convincing the Doctor he had Rose would get him. But he couldn't have Rose. It was obvious the Master had done something with that time machine and a TARDIS component, but it couldn't have anything to do with what the Master was implying. The Doctor clung to this fact. It was two minutes to time up – the Doctor couldn't falter now.

Martha began her distraction, began her story. The Master turned the entirety of his attention on Martha, humor and fury warring for a place as Martha laid out what had been done. It was almost amusing, even to the Doctor, a reversal of the usual story where the villain had the big moment of truth. Instead, it was Martha, brave, brilliant, proud Martha, on her knees but unbowed, telling the truth that would save worlds.

"I gave them an instruction," she concluded. "I told them that if everyone thinks of one word at one specific time…"

"Nothing will happen!" the Master tried to interrupt. Martha rose to her feet while he tried to wave her off.

"Right across the world, just one word, one thought at one moment, but with fifteen satellites!"

That was the moment the other Time Lord saw that he had been duped. "What?"

Jack, beaten, filthy, and murdered almost daily, smiled as he made the same realization at the same time. "The Archangel Network."

"A telepathic field binding the whole human race together, with all of them, every single person on Earth, thinking the same thing at the same time." Martha beamed proudly. "And that word is 'Doctor'."

The telepathic field shifted into actual psychic projection, giving the entire unmatched strength of the whole human race, linked for the first time in history, into the hands of what they chose to believe real. And what they believed was what Martha told them, that the Doctor was good, that he was the savior of mankind, that he could end all of this, if they just lent him their faith.

For more than half his life, the Doctor had been functioning on the belief of others, on the faith people had in him. What the human race gave him now was everything he had ever given them, over and over, Jack's unwavering conviction, Francine's hard-earned trust, Lucy's bitter-born hope, and a million, million times that. It restored him, body, mind, and soul: the Doctor, reborn in an instant, born as he'd come into this body in the first place, on a wave of love and light.

"Stop it!" the Master shouted. "No, nononono." He reached over and grabbed the occupant of the box through the force field, yanking her out of temporal abeyance and into the light. She certainly looked like Rose, and that was just impossible.

"Tell me the human race is degenerate now," the Doctor snapped, "when they can do this!"

"You can't do this! It's not fair!" The Master turned the screwdriver on the woman he held. "I'll kill her, you know I will!"

The woman elbowed the Time Lord, once and hard. The Master lost his grip in the surprise that was plain all over his face. The blonde dashed to get between the Master and the Jones family, a golden temporal field springing up around her. Temporal energy sang havoc and the Doctor could feel it, even with the maelstrom flowing through him, as the possibilities re-etched themselves in his blood. "Impossible!" the Doctor proclaimed grandly, hovering above the floor on the wave of psychic strength.

"You should talk!" Martha cried back happily.

The Doctor summoned the Master's screwdriver through sheer force of will, and banished it with equal conviction. Every atom of its existence, and he divided them. He tossed a silent acknowledgement to the non-existent blonde, and turned to the Master as he finally floated to the ground. "You know what happens now." Wrapping his arms around his foe, his former friend, the only other Time Lord in existence, the Doctor murmured, "I forgive you."

It was cruel, in its way, to say that. The Master never ever accepted that anything was his fault. He would proudly claim _credit_ for the destruction of whole star systems, but if someone ever tried to tell him it was wrong, it was not the Master's fault, and never had been.

The only way to forgive him, however, was to blame him in the first place, to pin full responsibility for what the older Time Lord had done wrong onto his chest and make him wear it. No one else in the Universe could make him, though, except the one person who'd never told the Master the whole thing was his fault to begin with. No one who didn't know him as well as the Doctor did could possibly imagine how terrible this particular penalty was for the Master.

But there was work to do, a world to save, a mystery to solve. As the Master huddled in horror and summoned his Tochlafane, the Doctor jumped to his feet. "Jack, the Paradox Machine," he ordered.

"I'm on it," Jack assured, and took the two nearest soldiers with him as he headed below.

The Doctor darted over to the blonde woman with the time machine. "Who are you?" he asked. "What'd he do to you?"

The woman smiled that painfully familiar smile, her eyes sparkling gold in the upper atmospheric light. "I'd think you'd know that, Doctor."

The Doctor stared at her until tears started in his eyes. She couldn't be, she couldn't possibly…

"Harry!" Lucy's voice, confused, mad, and frightened, interrupted just loudly enough for the Doctor to hear her. "Where'd you go?" the destroyed woman in the bright red dress called plaintively.

The Doctor almost swore. He'd forgotten the Master had Jack's teleporter. It was just like the older Time Lord to leave something like this Rose echo, just to distract him that crucial instant. How was he going to fix this? He started toward the nearest bank of controls, but the blonde tightened her grip.

"Hands on my shoulders," she ordered. Helplessly, the Doctor obeyed her, not even sure why as his hands settled on the unfamiliar blue leather. "Hold tight, I dunno what this'll do with you along."

Absently, the Doctor noticed that the coat was the same color as his ship as a familiar field, a small golden Vortex shell, sprang up around them. The Doctor blinked at it in utter astonishment, but before he could comment, he was standing on the surface of the Earth, looking out over one of the rocket fields.

"You always mess up the landings," the blonde complained.

"Oi!" the Doctor couldn't help protesting. Then, he noticed that he was standing in a cloud of pure white energy again. "What is this?"

"I time traveled us back," she said, then chewed at her lip. "It's an easy mistake, and I'm never gonna be good at this."

"But this is impossible!" the Doctor protested.

"D'you always have to wait 'til it's actually happening to say that?" The tongue-peeking grin was back, so much like Rose's that even the buoying energy wasn't enough to keep the Doctor from shaking. "I'm here, I've come back, like I always do, can't get rid of me, yeah?"

"I believe that you believe it," the Doctor allowed warily. "But even the Master couldn't do this for real, and I'd never. The cost is too high." He looked down into that precious, flower-like face, and wanted so very, very much to believe. He had the total power of the entire human race right now, it might, just might...

As always, his sense of responsibility stopped him before he even considered believing. "You can't be who you look like. It's not possible."

"If I wasn't me," she said, "then, how would I know this?" She reached for him slowly, looking focused and intent, so like the original that it hurt more than everything this past year had done, just to look at her. "I remember, way back, oh, ever such a long time ago. Before the Daleks and the Cybermen, before the Slitheen in Downing Street. Back before we'd even met properly. We were surrounded, by shop window dummies, do you remember, and you took my hand…" And here, she took his hand, turning her smaller one just so in his grip, establishing the touch that was theirs alone. "And you said one word – just the one. Run."

His hearts were breaking for her, for himself, for what he'd lost, for what she couldn't really be. "I'm sorry," he said for the second time that day. "I'm so sorry."

The energy around him abruptly disbursed for the second time and, while he was still trying to figure out what he was supposed to do about all of this, the Master teleported into existence, not one millimeter further than the end of the Doctor's nose. "That's not fair!" he protested. "That's never fair. Rose, I probably should've killed you when I met you!"

"Yeah, well, they prob'ly shoulda drowned you at birth, so it just goes to show!"

"I wonder what he'd do if he had to pick between us," the Master mused thoughtfully. "Last of his kind or love of his life… or do I have both those titles?"

"You want me to take off my earrings while you find a can of hairspray?" Rose demanded incredulously. "This ain't a loo, but if you wanna cat fight…" She shoved up her sleeves and stomped toward the Master. "You start hair pulling, and I'm kicking your balls to the moon. This is why you kept offing Jack. Admit it, Jealousy."

It was really a shame she wasn't Rose, because she was so perfect an image. "We're going back to the Valiant, now," the Doctor said, almost amused. "It's time to fix the planet."

"Actually, there isn't going to be a planet at all," the Master laughed. "I'm going to detonate the black hole convertors. If I can't have your precious planet, no one can!"

"Brat," Rose grumbled.

"Chav," the Master shot back.

The Doctor shook his head and told the Master the last truth about himself, the one he could never escape. Rose watched him with pride in her eyes, but she didn't speak again. The Doctor coaxed the teleporter out of the Master's hands, and in a second, the three were back on the Valiant.

Residual energy from the psychic wave meant that there was no pain this time. Moments, seconds after they reappeared, the Doctor felt the singing shout from the TARDIS, letting him know that things might just be all right after all. They had seconds before the paradox began to unravel.

The Doctor called out a hasty explanation, his eyes finding the dark-eyed blonde before he could even stop himself. It wasn't right, it wasn't fair, but he couldn't stop himself believing she might just…

"What can I do?" she asked sympathetically.

"Get them out of here," he said, gesturing to the Joneses standing protectively with Martha. "They don't have to remember this if they're not in the middle when it falls apart."

The woman nodded. She reached out a hand and brushed his for just a second, then she turned to go to the family who had never done anything to deserve being caught up in all this. They'd raised Martha to be responsible enough to hold the entire human race on her shoulders – she'd done great, incredible, impossible things, things even she wouldn't have believed she could do six months ago. But that hardly made the hell they'd been through even a day justified.

Francine and her husband wouldn't go with Rose, though. Tish, however, bowed to her parents' and Martha's encouragement. Although the conversations seemed to take forever, they were gone just before the paradox fell apart.

The world began to rewind as reality folded itself backward completely. The entirety of time and space from this point forward reset itself back to a way that eliminated the paradox altogether. As everything that was and could be went back to is and should be, the Doctor realized that he would probably never see her again. Even if she wasn't real, even if she couldn't possibly be Rose Tyler at all… it just hurt, that was all.

Just hurt forever.

* * *

Even if he had to do, the Doctor wasn't sure he would ever be able to forget every single thing that had happened after the paradox unraveled. It was so simple at first, excruciating but easy, just to know that his penalty for letting someone else escape the Time War alive was to spend the rest of eternity on some abandoned rock where not even a sentient shrubbery could come within thirty light years of the hypnotic psychopath. Only the TARDIS could hold a crazy Time Lord anymore.

But that bullet the Master had only just dodged the year before had found its home at last, and as usual, the Doctor was alone. He'd pleaded and begged until he could hear Rose's voice telling him to let go, that the other man was doing it purely to torture him, that there was nothing the Doctor could do to force his former friend to be anything but exactly whatever the man wanted to be.

She wasn't there, of course. He was almost certain he would have remembered that.

"What happened to her?" Jack asked.

The Doctor, leaning on a bit of railing just up from the Millennium Center, looked up at the Captain and shook his head. "She was a construct, had to have been, something the Master brought in purely to distract me. And maybe for her powers. It might have been a complete accident that she had that face."

"She appeared because I called," Jack said with a self-deprecating smile. "I was at my wits' end. I thought at first she was my imagination."

"She was a _time machine_," Martha insisted, fascinated and horrified at once.

The Doctor shrugged. "Or a time machine was her," he said. "I wouldn't even know how she was generated without seeing the Master's notes, and they were all lost with the paradox field collapse." The Doctor deliberately pushed the subject as far from his mind as he possibly could. "I really don't mind," he said. "Come with us."

Jack explained it was only the thoughts of his Torchwood team that had gotten him through this past year, and Martha supported him fully, admitting that when she met them, they had all seemed like incredible people to her.

"Don't give up on her," Jack insisted right before he made his farewells. "She never gave up on you or me. Don't give up on her."

"Jack, she wasn't real, she couldn't possibly have been real."

Jack nodded thoughtfully. "Well, if that makes you feel better."

"It does," the Doctor insisted pugnaciously. Did Jack want him to break down and fall apart out here? In front of everyone? Was that it?

Jack nodded tersely. "Have it your way," he said.

Jack made a joke about being a poster child, the thrust of which made him seem to be the Face of Boe. Without waiting for the shock to set in, or set off, he punched the Doctor in the mouth, and turned to go.

"What the hell was that for?" Martha demanded.

"Made me feel better," Jack said, and walked away.

The Doctor spat blood and just watched without a word.

* * *

Five days after she met the Doctor, Martha Jones walked away from the loneliest place she'd ever been. She was almost two years older, and a lifetime wiser, and her heart was her own again for the first time since his kiss.

He was one of the most beautiful things in creation, but like all the most beautiful things there were, he was also one of the most deadly. It was his nature, not a fault exactly, but not a place where Martha could live her life. She told him goodbye, then told him goodbye again, trying to explain that she had to leave him because she was sick of shadows.

His yesterday hung too close to him, and Martha's tomorrow would never be visible around it.

Her sister was waiting for her at the door to her mother's house. "She brought me home," she said. "The woman who rescued me from Mr. Saxon."

Martha smiled. "I know."

"She wanted to see you," Tish added. "But I needed to ask first. Is it okay if I call you before I take another job?"

Martha couldn't help grinning. "God yes," she said, almost overwhelmingly relieved to hear it. She swept her sister up in a warm hug, to find that the idea of nothing horrible happening to Tish was a comfort she would rather have than Tish understanding exactly what hurt. Her tears came unbidden, and they didn't stop for several aching, shaking, relieved moments.

"Thank you," said another voice behind Tish.

Martha looked up, brushing at her cheeks, to see the girl with eyes like the Doctor's own looking out at her, sorrow and eternity shining in the sincere dark depths. "For what?" Martha wondered.

"So much," said the woman who the Doctor swore didn't exist. "Oh, so much, Martha, like you can't know. You saved him. You saved the whole Universe, even if the Universe will never know. I know you started it to save him and finished it to save the world, but the real cost was unthinkable and you – all by yourself – you fixed that." She grinned a wolfish, brilliant grin, her strange dark eyes dancing. "And the best bit is you didn't need anyone to be your very, very best ever."

There was the understanding then, and Martha finally saw what she never had done before. They were truly of a piece, brilliant Martha Jones and the famous Rose Tyler, neither second best to the other, both the very best they could be, for the very best of reasons.

"Where will you go now?" Martha wondered.

"I can go anywhere," Rose said with a cat coy smile. "Did I mention I also travel in time?"

Martha Jones might not have caught the reference, but it was a toss up to her, whether Rose Tyler, as she vanished, looked more like the Cheshire Cat or the Big Bad Wolf.


	4. Epilogue

**In Defiance**

_Epilogue: Back to Yesterday_

In the middle of an abandoned field, far away from prying eyes or knowledgeable audiences, a large wooden pyre interrupted the flow of endless grass. It rose from the cold moor and stood solitary and silent beneath a murky sky.

As the sun set, a blue box appeared out of no where, and from the box, a tall, brown haired man stepped, a shrouded bundle held tightly in his arms.

There were customs governing this moment, ancient customs both stylized and practical, both ritualistic and logical. Although the man who bore the body to its final rest was the very last representative of the race that made those customs, and though he had spent far more of his life fleeing their rules than abiding by them, and though he himself had turned the key and relegated that most ancient of societies to the realms of myth and legend, he followed their rule here to the letter none the less.

Thus, when the stars had come out, the constellation of Orion high in the sky, the Doctor, the Last of the Time Lords, touched a torch to the pyre of his oldest friend, his oldest enemy. Fire caught in the dry wood, and wind fed it on, and the mortal remains of the Time Lord Koschei, called the Master, were committed back to the Universe that gave him life.

"I remembered," the Doctor said to the woman who seemed to have appeared at his side.

"I thought you might," she replied softly.

"I didn't think you were real then, either," he added.

"I know. What were you thinking, standing out to watch Krakatoa explode, anyway?"

The Doctor shrugged. "Whatever happened to that drawing you made? It was a very good likeness."

"Washed up off Sumatra," she said. "And sent a message to another century." She shrugged. "I walk in eternity, now."

"Me too," the Doctor said, the fire of the cremation blazing in his eyes. He didn't turn his head to meet the woman's gaze, but his hand slowly migrated toward hers. She didn't flinch when their hands brushed, just let the light, hinted touch continue.

"Why here?" she wondered after a long moment. "You don't have to explain anything else, if you don't want, but how come you picked this spot? The location's a bit out of the way, isn't it?"

"This is the former location of the Pharos Project radio transmitter. It was probably his favorite place on the planet."

"Why?" she asked, still sounding bewildered.

"I died here," he admitted, his dark eyes tracing the ground that supported the pyre now, that had once supported his fourth incarnation in his last moments. "The Master's greatest accomplishment," he added bitterly.

"He was probably ecstatic," she said dryly.

After a long moment, the Doctor nodded weakly. "He loved me once."

"I believe he did," the blonde said softly, and now she let her hand sneak into the Doctor's grip.

The Doctor turned to look at her, and nightmares and shadows shone in his eyes. He tilted his head, took slow deep breaths, shook his head sharply. Nothing worked, and he was crying. Tears, cold and copious and rarer than diamonds, poured unchecked down his pale, freckled cheeks. The sobs wracked his too slender body, the force of them strong enough to shatter his fragile form.

The blonde woman tugged gently, raised her open arms, and let him collapse against her. Even his slight weight was too much for her to support, but neither of them did anything to stop it when his momentum bore them both to the ground. Smaller than him but not so broken, she held him like a child. Soothing, gentle nonsense whispered its way past her lips, building a slow, haunting rhythm. Before long she was singing, an alien lullaby, ancient and strange.

"I hate him so much!" the Doctor confessed, the words sounding ripped from his throat. "Rose, I just… oh, I fucking! HATE! HIM!!!"

"It's all right," she said. "You're allowed."

"It's not what you think," he insisted urgently. "I forgave him all that. I meant it – I had to do. I can even forgive him this – defying his very nature, just to hurt me, because it isn't. Against his nature, I mean. But there's one thing…"

"He left you," Rose said. "In the War."

Weakly, the Doctor nodded. "He just ran. Maybe together we could have saved them, and if not…" Raking a shaky hand through his hair, the Doctor looked at Rose with such deep, eternal sorrow in his eyes. "You see, his moral compass doesn't even point at reality; it never has. He could've done it. He could've killed them all and blamed it on famous dead people and gone out for tea. But he left me!"

The long, pain filled hours of that moonless night passed with the kind of slowness that defines words like "interminable". For the Doctor, once the swift but desperately needed storm of his tears had passed, it was like a disembodied dream, and he often felt, as the hours crept and stuttered along, that he was a mere shadow of a spirit, hovering at the edge of a funeral, unable to feel or touch or make his presence known.

The death-knell urge to throw himself on that pyre passed with his rage, and he supposed Rose must have taken it away, rescued it like she rescued so many things. "I'm sorry for what I did to you," he whispered.

"You didn't do anything to me except not finish a sentence. Someday, if you're ever ready…" She looked out over the fields as she had over that beach, too far away to be an earthbound thing, even then, if ever. Her hand came up to somehow compass everything, herself, the pyre, the TARDIS, yesterday and tomorrow. "All the rest of this, I did to myself. I told you when it happened: I create myself. You can blame yourself for anything else you want, Doctor, but not for me. I chose this."

"You…" he started to protest.

"No," Rose said. "I couldn't become your equal, I couldn't become your kind. You're the Last of the Time Lords, and there are reasons for that."

The pyre had finally done its work and, in the very darkest hour of the night, the Doctor and Rose finally got back to their feet and walked back toward the TARDIS. As Rose approached, there was a faint hint of a golden aura around both the Police Box and the girl.

"This is going to take some getting used to," the Doctor allowed.

"Yeah, 'cuz learning to deal with it while it was actually happening was so easy," Rose said.

The Doctor looked down at her, and the familiarity and complete, utter Rose-ness of the situation washed over him, pulling him under like a tidal wave, washing out everything in a torrential crescendo of joy. He laughed aloud, couldn't help it if he had to do, and tugged her close, in his arms and to his hearts.

"My girl, my girl, my precious girl," he murmured when, weak with the happiness of holding her, and the love of all she was, he stopped laughing long enough to just smell her hair.

Rose grinned up at the Doctor, tongue poking through her teeth, eyes bright with love and mischief. "Feels a bit like Star Wars."

"Return of the Jedi," the Doctor corrected, looking back over his shoulder and almost, just almost, expecting to see the ghost shadow of the Koschei who grew up with him.

"Yeah, that one," Rose said, and laid her head on his shoulder. "Doctor, don't," she added, tilting his head away from the fire with her hand. "It's time to start over, now, start something new. You can do that if anyone can."

The Doctor nodded. "Where are we going?" he asked.

"Cardiff first," she said, ignoring him pointedly while he pouted. In the face of his whining, Rose grinned and looked up at the fading, jewel-bright stars. "That one," she selected. "No, wait, that one."

The Doctor laughed. "Better go with the first one," he said, even as he remembered the night that felt like another lifetime ago, when they'd first chosen such a star together in the Christmas sky.

Rose reached inside her dark pink jumper and pulled out a familiar key – the anomalous TARDIS key that was twinned to the machine itself somehow – dangling it in front of his face. "That one," she agreed.

A brief moment of melancholy rolled over the Doctor again as the first dark crimson stain of morning made itself plain at the eastern horizon. "When are you going to leave me?" he asked.

Rose looked up at him and he could see a mirror in her eyes. They weren't innocent anymore, nor were they young. All the same, they were full of hope and promise, thunder and rain and such boundless joy. She'd wanted freedom enough to infect a Dalek with it, wanted him safe enough to rewrite reality for it. She'd loved him enough to see everything he was and still call him hers. He'd died for her once and lived for her twice, and it seemed she'd become something completely different just to live for him.

She nodded as this realization caught fire in his soul and in his head, as the silent singing he could hear, the song that was the TARDIS's dirge, suddenly acquired harmony and modulated into the Theme of Hope. Rose Tyler's dark eyes glowed shiny gold as she stood on her toes and whispered her answer across his lips. "Never."


End file.
